Anki for music — after 2 years
Two years ago, I wrote this story as I was starting to use Anki to keep track of the music I was learning. I wrote an update last year, and now it’s time to take a look at where this past year has brought me on this adventure.
My catalog has grown to 499 pieces of music. 110 of them are songs that I do with my buddy Mark, with whom I have a duo called “Marie’n’Me”. About 50 are piano pieces, about 25 are songs I do with other people, and the rest are ones that I sing and play myself. It’s hard to believe that the number of songs has grown so large, but they keep getting added, and Anki makes sure I don’t forget how to play the ones I already have. It does this with an algorithm based on spaced repetition, which, for me, has been a very effective technique. Anki is open source, and is available free for PC and Android.
My settings
There’s no getting away from the fact that things go better when I stay up to date reviewing cards. When I develop a backlog, as I had in the picture to the left, cards that are new, that I expect to see at least once a day, just don’t come up, and I lose momentum on them. The image at left is from a few weeks ago, and when I realized that my backlog was getting worse instead of better, I (again) increased the maximum amount of time between reviews, so I now have it set to 2 months.
Increasing that maximum interval helped, and I was able to make the backlog go away, finally. I have also created two “custom study” decks: one for marieNme that looks a week ahead, and one for me alone that looks 3 days ahead. It gives me a nice picture of how much is due.
When I am all caught up, a nice rhythm develops, where I have a handful of songs that are in my “current” deck. A really nice feature is that as I come across songs in my “review” deck that I would like to really work on (this is something that’s happening more and more, where I’ll do a song I haven’t done for a month, and in that month I’ve developed new skills that I now want to bring to that song — it’s like I’m not the same person I was a month ago, and it’s really cool to be able to notice that), I can just click the “browse” button and then the “edit” menu allows me to add that song to the end of my “current” deck.
Here’s how things looked at the beginning of one day this week, with a small number of songs actually due, and the bulk of them in the look-ahead decks. The ones that are due below are the new ones, the ones that get worked on every day. Once I get through those, I switch to the look-ahead deck, to get a jump on what’s due in the next few days.
Clicking “rebuild” on the look-ahead deck refreshes it to what’s due in the next 3 days. If I actually exhaust the deck, I can increase the number of days it looks ahead (under “options”), and rebuild it. It’s like building a cushion, so if things come up in my life and I can’t get as much work done for a couple of days, it doesn’t create that bottleneck.
That maximum interval will continue to need to be increased as the catalog is growing, and there are always new songs being added. It’s always a bit weird right after I make the change to a longer interval, just because of the algorithm — it takes a while to stabilize applying the new interval to every song. But the cool thing is that I’m not having a problem remembering the songs, even the ones I just review once every two months.
Card fields and display CSS
These are the fields I have for each card. I have a link to mention of the song in Wikipedia, a link to a lyrics website for the song, and a time field which I haven’t really started using yet. The Songbook field is for any media I’ve created that I might want to display, mostly sheet music. The Notes field is for anything I might want to look at while I’m playing the song — usually lyrics, sometimes chords that I’m apt to forget, anything at all. It’s pretty helpful to have. The only required field is the title; everything else is optional, and very few songs have all fields filled in.
In addition to the fields I’ve created, Anki has a built-in tagging functionality. This is one of its great strengths for me. My use of tags has evolved into groups of tags. Tags that start with A designate artists involved with the song, B is for beats per minute so I can track tempo, C is for collections like albums or songbooks that include the song, G for genre, H tracks position on the Billboard charts, K for the key the song is in, Y for year, and a bunch of musical tags that I’ve developed to track musical trends that I notice. O is for capo settings, and Z is for harmonica key, but those two only get used for marieNme songs, which use guitar and harmonica.
This year I also started playing a lot more with the CSS used to display the cards. This can be tricky, but Anki’s tool for entering it displays it for you wysiwyg, so I just play with it til it does what I want. It’s not extremely sophisticated, but it gets the job done. The way this is coded, the Wikipedia and Lyrics links only appear if they are filled in.
My songbook
Anki’s browser is not very robust, but fortunately, I have been able to extract the data, so I am slowly building the browser I want for it. The data I’m interested in is not actually the Anki data, but the tags I’ve created. It’s not easy to go looking for songs from within Anki, so this is starting to fill that gap for me.
This is what it’s looking like these days. There are drop-down search boxes across the top so you can search for a specific song by title, or a list by artist, genre, collection, year, etc. The list of songs that is displayed is all hyperlinks, so clicking on the C under Key will bring up a list of songs that are in C. This tool is really useful for putting together set lists. It’s written in Python and Javascript, and operates completely independently from Anki. It’ll be interesting to see how this software evolves as I keep working. I have many ideas of things I’d like to do with it, but the reality is that I spend most of my time on music these days. The programming happens in short bursts every few months.
Well, that’s it for this year. Thanks for reading!
Update from 2022, after 5+ years!
